Powell: Building better tomatoes

There was a time when that would have sounded absurd. But these days, you don’t have to give up having tomatoes in your salads or on your sandwiches just because the season has changed.

Food scientists have developed tomatoes that are available year-round — and cost less than $2 per pound.

The problem, of course, is that the hard, tasteless red spheres in markets this time of year bear little resemblance to fruit harvested at the peak of the season.

Since plants were first grown for food, farmers, and more recently plant breeders, have selected their best plants, saved the seeds and planted what they hoped would be improved varieties.

Through much of the last half of the 20th century, scientists and plant breeders largely devoted their efforts to practical matters, creating tomatoes that were fast-growing, robust and easy to harvest.

But there were some unintended consequences of their selections, such as inferior flavor.

Lately, my colleagues and I have been working on ways to reintroduce some of the memorable tastes and smells that have been lost, without sacrificing the benefits.

The goal is to have hardy, economical fruit year-round that tastes like what’s harvested at the peak of the season.

But it’s complicated. Tomatoes are among the most genetically diverse crops we have, in large part due to human intervention.

In the last 20 years, scientists have started to identify which tomato genes produce which traits, and they have put that knowledge to good use.

For example, tomato seeds with the “VFNT” designation, valued by home gardeners and large-scale producers alike, contain genes that make plants resistant to certain kinds of nematodes, bacteria and viruses.

Now the challenge is to find the genes that control the juiciness and taste we all love, and find a way to produce tomatoes that have those genes as well as the hardiness and longevity of modern supermarket tomatoes. Then we might have tomatoes that taste like summer at winter holiday dinners.